How bad (or wonderful) is this winter?

The accumulated severity (AWSSI) of this winter in Detroit is marked with the blue curve. Each day's contribution to the total appears as faint blue bars in the background. The top 5 most severe winters from 1950-51 to 2012-13 are included for reference.

Boustead and her colleague, Steve Hilberg, a climatologist at the Midwestern Regional Climate Center at the University of Illinois, have developed a winter severity index.

"I'd just as soon winter get done with, so to me, it is an index of misery."

“To him, winter is wonderful, so to him, this is an index of winter greatness. To me, I’d just as soon winter get done with, so to me, it is an index of misery,” she says.

The index's full name is the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index. Boustead and Hilberg have been tracking how cold and snowy each winter is, and how long it lasts. They can track winters back to the year 1950, when this kind of record-keeping started.

Detroit breaks its own record

Boustead offered to run some numbers for Michigan.

“We’ve looked at Detroit and we’ve looked at Sault Ste. Marie, and in Detroit what we found out is this year, at least to date, is the most severe so far since 1950-51,” she says.

This winter in the Detroit area beats out even those epic winters of the late 1970s.

In Sault Ste. Marie, of course, people are used to severe winters. There, it’s the 9th most severe winter on record.

“You know, one thing we are noticing in our index is overall, there’s a trend toward less severe winters, pretty much everywhere, especially when it comes to temperatures. So when we do get these years that are pretty cold, they feel more unusual to us because they are more unusual now.”

She says with climate change, we can still expect some extremes like we’re getting this winter.

“And one thing it’s loading the dice toward is getting less frequent cold air outbreaks, but they’re still just as cold when they do happen, so to us it feels more abrupt, more extreme.”

She says in Michigan, we might also get more lake effect snow with the lakes not freezing over as much.